OK...I'll play 'cos I'm a sheeple too...
I chose Neal Cassady 'cos he's my counterculture hero. The fastest man alive, the link between the beats and the 60's acid scene, between the east coast Millbrook philosophical school and the west coast kandy kids...he dropped psylocibin and acid with Leary, he hit the road with Kerouac, he drove the bus for Kesey and the Pranksters, Ginsberg wanted to bed him, Burroughs loved his writing...you really can't get much cooler than that...get me a two pound hammer 'cos the jitters have started to hum...my ode to Neal...
Neal Cassady, The Sundancing Kid
Where are you Neal Cassady now that I need you? Beat muse to a hip generation, forever searching for that new frontier, and never enough time, never enough speed....On the road with Jack, you blistered the American heartland chasing new tomorrows and left him to write the travel guide...Amidst towering ivory shadows and ivy clad walls you lit the torch , blue collar minstrel, burning the esoteric search for knowledge with your brutal acid reality, and within that boiling psychic maelstrom you held aloft the Philosophers Stone, transforming academic curiosity into Huxley’s door key, Leary into Benway, and then left the good doctor to tune in and turn on a new generation...On the bus with Kesey and Co., you drove the dancing day-glo swirls and neon painted children ‘Furthur’, much further than expected, forever looking around that next bend, over the next horizon...Is that what you found in ‘68, alone, away from home, beside the rails of Mexican iron? Was that the new frontier after which you chased so hard? And now , what for me, standing at the bus stop waiting? Languishing in this Antipodean wilderness, the icons of the past now merely museum relics and historical footnotes, curiosities to be discussed within the sanctity of our turnstiled edifices of higher learning, whilst the moral majority and religious fundamentalists nibble away at individual freedoms so hard won. We almost cleared that hurdle once...It was time in ‘72, but after ‘75’s passion play the flame had burnt too brightly and there was no longer anger enough to maintain any rage, just despair, and despair won’t burn, it can't burn - just slowly transforms into the spirit crushing wormwood bitterness of recent years. ’In darkest times we burn our brightest’ and I can feel the blackness closing in...the funeral pyres fed with minds and books leap up in stark relief and I foresee once more the fall of man. In ‘88 the concrete fell, but Neo-Nazi’s still march on through Berlin; and human flesh stained asphalt remains in Tiennaman Square as we fawn for trade in China; and innocence and lives and schools are smashed by airborne death in Tripoli to teach them terrorism’s wrong; and black Australia still cries for its generation lost but not forgotten because ‘sorry’ is too big a word for John to say: and starving Moslem children don't make the headlines in the Western Christian press as the US pupeteers make the UN marionette dance to their capitalist jig....walls fall, and walls rise, but the walls within the mind remain. The doors were closed in ‘66, the keys incarcerated with Ken and Tim and William S. behind the walls of bureaucracy, and Hoffman’s ‘Problem Child’ is out of print
...ahhh that's better...the spinning is slowing down...no sympathy for the devil folks, you buys your ticket, you takes your ride as the Hunter man says.
Neal
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The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom.
[This message has been edited by neal_cassady (edited 28 September 2000).]
